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This map I love was in a book called "Chronicle of the Century" that I read as a kid, usually while sitting on the toilet: Also about those sitty German uniforms, would the paratrooper helmet been better than the regular steel helmet? Or was that needlessly complicated too? Edit: I guess I never posted pictures on a forum like this. It's the one with the Russia as an octopus, Scandinavia as dogs, etc. Grimnarsson fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Dec 7, 2020 |
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Dec 7, 2020 04:03
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ChubbyChecker posted:Given that the Allies invaded Iceland and Persia, why didn't they bomb Sweden who was supplying Germany with critical materials? Were there any plans for it? They were willing to basically invade in March 1940 if Finland provided a pretext by a formal request for aid. Otherwise, wouldn't the nature of the resources require a lot of bombing, sustained and intense since it's mines, ports, railways? From what I understand Sweden started distancing itself from Germany as soon as it could and diplomatic channels were open with the Allies so they probably understood Sweden's predicament.
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Dec 26, 2020 21:40
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Gnoman posted:Besides, a neutral power like Sweden has a lot of uses in war for things like prisoner exchange, diplomacy, Red Cross measures, etc. Thousands of Jews found refuge in Sweden. The nazi roundup of Jews in Denmark was found out before hand and then a co-ordinated rescue over the straits of Denmark to Sweden was done by locals. Alexandra Kollontai, the Soviet ambassador in Stockholm, was a connection for Finnish private citizens and for the government for at least preliminary negotiations with the USSR during both the Winter War and the Continuation War, or at least the other. I think I recently watched some video that a number of ships were allowed from Sweden to the Atlantic and back on a timely basis that both the Allies and the Germans agreed upon as it was beneficial to both. Hitler then throttled the trade to put the screws on Sweden.
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Dec 26, 2020 22:32
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Ataxerxes posted:Also, by early March the Finnish front was collapsing. No aid sent at the time would have reached Finland in time to save anything. An unilateral declaration of war from the UK and France against the Soviet Union might have affected things if it had come several months earlier, but by the time Finland was offered an armistice it was in no shape to fight any longer. I agree. From what I've read even at best the Franco-British expeditionary force would have been 30 000 in Northern Finland, the rest (the bulk really) to occupy Northern Sweden and Norway. And at that point the Red Army had penetrated and flanked the Mannerheim Line nearing the outskirts of Viipuri, Finnish Army had no reserves, next to nothing in artillery ammunition, etc. The offer of aid in and of itself, in the form it was made in March 1940, was the best possible effect it could have as Stalin wanted the war ended without enlarging it. The deadline for the offer of aid was the day before the peace was signed but both Stalin, or Molotov, agreed to back date it. But that also gave away to the Germans the British and French intentions. Edit: The earlier offers of aid were conditional on Norwegian and Swedish consent, which they weren't going to give as it was already suspected that the main aim was to occupy Northern Sweden. If a unilateral declaration of war on the USSR had happened in December or January then the Soviets wouldn't have had any reason to end the war until a final completion, perhaps? Grimnarsson fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Dec 26, 2020 |
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Dec 26, 2020 22:53
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Kotkin laid out that argument in his second installment of his Stalin biography, that in 1914 the Germans thought that war was coming, Russia was fast industrialing and therefore it was better to have that war sooner than later, in 1940 Stalin allowed German diplomats and military attachés to tour Soviet factories to dissuade them from attacking in a show of strength, but giving Germany the same old conclusion that war must come sooner than later since they had already decided it will come. I think that's the most important thing, that the Germans had decided that war is inevitable.
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Dec 27, 2020 06:12
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White Coke posted:The reason the question is in two parts is because I've seen the specific year of 1916 pop up often enough that there's probably some source that they get it from, but I can't find it so I don't know how authoritative it is, or if it's even contemporary. As for second part, I asked because I want to know if there's any hard data that could validate the fears of 1916 being some kind of a turning point. Was there a certain amount of railroad tracks that would'v been built, a certain number of artillery pieces that would've been produced, or just that the population would have grown enough to somehow be insurmountable for Germany? Assuming the German General Staff was afraid of how powerful Russia was growing, what was the metric they used to quantify its power? Ultimately, yes there's more to warfare than material superiority, but it certainly helps so I don't think it'd just devolve into counterfactuals about gay, black, Imperial Russia. I'm saying without any real knowledge that the construction of railroads (to key regions of course) and plain production of steel by tonnage are metrics that they would have looked at. That's how they measured who's industrialised and who isn't, and the Soviet Union's planned economy aimed to those as a key metric for prosperity. I'm basing this off of what I learned in school about industrialisation and Adam Curtis documentaries. What the books I've read recently say is that Russia was far weaker than any statistics could show, but it bounced up. Brusilov's offensive was among the most effective against the Central Powers during the whole war.
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Dec 27, 2020 06:27
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Xiahou Dun posted:To the first point, I obviously can't prove a negative, but I've read a decent amount of primary sources and I've never heard of such a thing ; the general idea that Russia might arm up and be a monster, sure, but that's 2 years earlier. Where are you getting this from? The projections would start earlier than the war, decades maybe? Russia's economy was growing rapidly overall and railroads as a funnel from Russia to Poland were seen as a strategic mobilisation asset, stuff like that.
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Dec 27, 2020 06:53
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aphid_licker posted:Yeah I was thinking more like the Nazis invade Sweden for whatever reason and the Swedes decide to leave them a little gently caress YOU at Kiruna. It might have been the French and the British who were more likely to invade Kiruna for its öre to deny it for the Germans. At least far more likely than seems in hindsight. Like what the British did in Narvik was some half-hearted attempt after they were upstaged by Germany. I'd put smilies of Sweden and Finland here if I could bear clicking that "smilies" button again. Heh, "bear".
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Apr 10, 2021 08:48
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Panzeh posted:There was a shakeup in 1954-55, and the main beneficiaries were southerners who didn't have to sit through the purges and arrived just in time to get into Politburo positions, Le Duan being the biggest one. Giap and Ho were too prominent to outright be purged out, but they no longer had executive power. It's fairly interesting, in the recentish documentary by Burns, they said this somewhat. That Giap and Ho were sidelined by the Southern communists who wanted to focus on unification, as opposed to the Northerners who wanted to draw back the military involvement in the South and focus on the economy instead. And they brought Giap back, after the disasters of -68?
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Apr 13, 2021 09:54
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Coral Sea?
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May 10, 2021 00:00
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Fearless posted:Executing a conscript for desertion seems especially cruel to me. I remember seeing a documentary probably close to two decades ago about a monument in some small town in England to men who died in WWI from that town that was blocked by some resident because one of the men was executed for desertion and/or cowardice. The documentary looked into the case and found that the man had fought commendably with citations in many major battles from 1915 to 1917 or so and then deserted repeatedly until he was sentenced to death and executed. Like I don't know, I guess it makes sense that there's harsh punishment for not wanting to fight a brutal war that as far as anyone can tell needs to be fought because maybe otherwise no one would fight it, but maybe what makes "sense" isn't productive or is even counter-productive. Certainly the war wouldn't have been lost if all those who deserted had served prison sentences instead. Executing a conscript for cowardice is cruel, but I recall reading about the Spanish Civil War and the French guy who was a leader in the International Brigades who was very eager to execute volunteers who didn't hold up under fire and it seems just as cruel.
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Jun 27, 2021 19:40
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The same crew that made the WWI week by week are making the same for the Franco-Prussian war, and there's a quite gruesome anecdote by some Prussian officer that even though the firepower of the French is heavy and results in massive casualties discipline and aggressiveness can still overcome the defence. It's quite harrowing and quite possibly informed the nations going into 1900s? Might be this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgE01ASURF8
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Sep 10, 2021 23:38
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Elissimpark posted:I wonder if you'd bother physically taking Luxembourg City or just bomb it flat. From memories of being there 20 years ago, it seems like trying to get actual troops into the central city would be pretty difficult. IIRC it was more of an infiltration mission by a small team of highly trained commandos rather than a mass assault.
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Oct 15, 2021 07:23
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Warden posted:Just to make sure I have my bastards and forumlore correct, Krautman wasn't the guy who registered on SA because people were dissing his books and proceeded to toss a gun magazine at a goon's vintage car in a offline meet, right? It was someone else, right? Krautman's just the guy with a hard-on for the SS in his books and rampant islamophobia? He did have a habit of arguing with forums that were doing "let's read"s of his books.
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Apr 23, 2022 12:26
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So that new All Quiet on the Western Front on netflix? Americans have way more respect for the source material than Germans do  A rare look at the German WWI tank in action though not in a way one might expect.
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Oct 29, 2022 21:06
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ContinuityNewTimes posted:I think those are Saint-Chamonds. You're right.
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Oct 29, 2022 22:29
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Alchenar posted:I watched it this evening, thought it was pretty bad. It's just a bit of a mess of a film that struggles to have anything to say (ironic given the source material it's adapting) or to make you feel anything about what's going on. The two previous films named "all quiet on the western front" made by yankees were quite ok. This one could have been named "1918". I'd hope a movie about that war is anti-war because what else could it be? The book by the title was banned in Germany for being anti-war.
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Oct 30, 2022 01:03
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Magnetic North posted:So I only know the broad strokes of WWI, and I know it was a stupid clusterfuck of alliances and new horrible weapons. But I'd still be curious to see the thread try to argue with sincerity what the best possible thing to come out of WWI was. The Baltic states were able to throw off the yoke of German rule they had been under since the 15th century or so.
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Oct 30, 2022 23:42
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ilmucche posted:What is a storm of steel-esque movie? I think it's an autobiography by a German stormtrooper officer. A polar opposite to the aforementioned "all quiet on the western front" from what I understand.
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Oct 31, 2022 00:01
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ilmucche posted:Oh is it the book that I think a goon described as an as officer going " yeah we were the best and the Americans ran away every time pretty much as soon as we made contact. On an unrelated note we were always obliterated by artillery like 10 minutes later." That sounds more like WW2 than WW1.
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Oct 31, 2022 01:05
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MikeCrotch posted:Re. Point 2, this is something that was explicitly encouraged by the Nazis, both because of the idea that competition was good for having the "best" people come out on top, and because having your underlings constantly at each others throats is good practice to make sure none of them get too big for their boots and upstage you. Of course, this then makes things horribly inefficient if you want to actually a country effectively. That reminds of Stephen Kotkin's second part of Stalin's biography where he touches a little bit on Hitler and how he was straight up lazy, as a contrast to Stalin I guess. He liked to look at maps, imagine military moves and the territories of Greater Germany, design and build models of grand buildings for the new capitol. He didn't like mundane governance or reading memos so his ministers and underlings often interpreted his rants and deduced what policy Hitler would like implemented, or they did what they wanted and convinced Hitler afterwards that they were just following his instructions. So unless that characterisation is wrong, I'd say the whole "Nazi inter-government competition and overlap was a Darwinist scheme", stupid as even that would be, is giving them too much credit.
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Dec 31, 2022 00:18
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In movies, or other modern recreations of battles, there is often also a sense total lack of of self-preservation for the individuals, especially for the antagonists because they are actors who know they can just leap over a wall of shields because they know there's a cushy mattress over there. Roman legionaries (and their opponents) should use more hand-thrown projectiles too. I've seen hypothesis' that throwing projectiles was mostly what the Romans were doing anyway.
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Jan 12, 2023 20:58
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SeanBeansShako posted:Last fifteen minutes of The Winter War. I think it was the most expensive movie made in Finland up to that point. To be generous, those last minutes maybe conveyed the sense of the last days when the Finnish Army was almost in a rout as the Red Army had made the main defensive lines untenable, with Finns having no reserves no ammunition for artillery and shortages for small arms ammunition. It's been a while since I saw the movie and the ending was pretty chaotic? Also, there's the Winter War movie that was made for foreign audiences that is from what I've heard not very good because it's very short and cut up, then at the other end there's a mini-series version that's like 5 hours alltogether.
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Jan 12, 2023 21:09
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLSuS8gYSH8&t=103s
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Jan 17, 2023 16:50
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Libluini posted:I remember reading a description of the Battle of Lützen (the one where Gustav Adolf bought it) that claimed the Swedes finally won the battle when they rolled up their weird light leather-cannons right up close to the Catholics' formations and broke them up by blasting into them at close range, so that would fall into the same category, I assume. The same was the case at the Battle of Breitenfeld where the Swedish infantry closely co-operated with the cavalry, disrupting the Imperial cavalry with its firepower which allowed the Swedish cavalry to defeat them. Seems like a better explanation than what I was taught in school, that Swedish cavalry was better because they aggressively charged right in whereas the Germans messed around with pistols. Supposedly the Swedes learned to do this by learning from their defeats against Polish-Lithuania, so it came as a surprise when I read Peter Englund's book about Charles X who invaded Poland right after the 30 Years War and it said that Swedes had adopted German cavalry tactics and methods in the course of the 30YW and consistently overcame the Poles who were using more medieval methods, ferocious charges and so on. Of course that maybe simplistic too since in addition to the Swedes Poland was facing multiple enemies against whom their cavalry and tactics were perfectly fine.
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Jan 18, 2023 15:20
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Loezi posted:Finland might also be an interesting data point here. During the 1941 offensive phase of the Continuation War, the degree of mobilization (including women) was some 16 % of the population, or 660.000 people. This meant that the industry lost approximately 50 % of its male workforce, and agriculture some 70% of the male workforce. Metal works were the best off, losing only some 10 % of the male workforce. The labor shortages were so bad that the army had to constantly juggle temporarily demobilizing people to meet needs of the agriculture, while not endangering the situation at the front. For the fall harvest of 1941, the calculus was basically "we need to demobilize between 5 and 10% of our military just or people will start starving." Note that this is just the agricultural sector. Come winter, it was the forestry sector that needed tens of thousands of men, and then you need even more labor to build fortifications etc. etc. Comparing the numbers of the Finnish Army in 1939/40 and 1941 the latter paints a number of a pretty extreme level of mobilisation. But aside from the offensive phase of Operation Barbarossa and the Soviet offensive in 1944 for the Soviets the North Western Front was a relatively quiet one so there was room for a partial demobilisation. Like my great-grand-father was in for 1939/40 and 1941 and was sent home in 1942, perhaps because he was in his 40s and an industrial worker. Paternal grandfather was not demobilised but had help assigned to his farm.
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Mar 10, 2023 23:38
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The Lone Badger posted:Also not uncommon IIRC to offer monetary payment to deserters who bring significant equipment with them (aircraft, vehicles etc). Here's a Finnish one from the Winter War:  Revolver 100 rubles, rifle 150, submachine gun 400, machine gun 1500, a tank 10 000, and a grand prize for an airplane: 10 000 dollars and free passage anywhere.
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Dec 14, 2023 20:29
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